John Glassco: Thirty Years

John Stinson Glassco

December 15, 1909 – January 29, 1981

RIP

AL PALMER PLAGIARISM SCANDAL!

There's no question that Al Palmer's Montreal Confidential (1949) was inspired by New York: Confidential! (1947), but who would've expected the ugly accusation of plagiarism? And yet, here it is, as reported by gossip columnist Fitz (Gerald FitzGerald) in the 14 October 1950 edition of The Gazette:

Combing through both books, I find the charge to be entirely unfounded. I add that no two chapters share the same title, though I did come across this:

Someone get on the phone to Gads Hill Place.

Palmer had no need of Lait and Mortimer; he was much more the wordsmith than either New Yorker. William Weintraub recognizes as much in his forward to the recent Véhicule Press edition: "Al is not content to simply talk about attractive women walking down the Street; for him they are 'local lovelies ankling along.'" Beer is "stupor suds", loose women are "trampettes" – and just look at these Montreal Confidential chapter titles:

The Scrambled-Eared Gentry

The Broken Leg Brigade

Caprice Chinois

Characters, Characters – Never Any Normal People

The Younger Degeneration

Any words lifted from Lait and Mortimer's books come from the cover of their follow-up, Chicago Confidential, which appeared at newsstands just a few months before Montreal Confidential. "The low-down on the big town!" says one; "The Low Down on the Big Town!" says the other. Did the pair even write this cover copy? Did Palmer write his? Never mind – no one bothered to trademark the phrase.

I expect that what upset the New Yorkers was the idea of someone honing in on what they believed to be a borderless franchise – one that exhausted itself well before the 1954 death of Jack Lait.

Palmer wrote no follow-up to Montreal Confidential. Given his ill-feelings about Hogtown and its inhabitants, Toronto Confidential was out of the question.

And Ottawa Confidential? Well, that just sounds silly. Even today.

Your morning smile: This small piece on an A.J. Cronin impersonator – I kid you not – from the very same column:

Related post: '...a helluva town to come back to'

Parisian French, not Québécois French

French for Murder

Bernard Mara [pseud. Brian Moore]

New York: Fawcett, 1954

With French for Murder, Brian Moore quit Harlequin as a publisher, abandoned Montreal as a setting and put aside his name for more literary efforts. I think the last of these is most important. This is a Bernard Mara novel, the first that the Irish-Canadian penned "pretending to be an American". The writing is much tighter than in previous pulps Wreath for a Redhead and The Executioners, but it is also less interesting. French for Murder is a novel with drive; it moves at a breakneck speed that affords no glimpse of character and little time for atmosphere.

Our hero here is Noah Cain, a luckless American who stumbles drunkenly upon a homicide in an otherwise polite Parisian hotel. Fingered as the murderer – a Hitchcockian "wrong man" – he is soon on the run, sprinting from Montmartre to Marseilles to Cassis in search of the girl who can clear his name.

Straightforward, conventional and bland, in French for Murder there are no real twists or surprises. Sure, the American military policeman turns out to be one of the baddies, but we knew that he was too good to be true. And when Cain is captured by crooks, we and he had sense that it was coming. His escape provides one of the more interesting passages in the novel:

I fired. His gun dropped to the carpet and he dropped on top of it, a pancake stain of blood growing in his thigh. He scrambled for the gun. I fired again. The second bullet hit him in the shoulder. He jerked convulsively and fell, face down, gasping. I felt no emotion. I had stopped him, the way you would shut a gate on a mad dog.

This is as good as it gets – and it's a darn site better than:

Uniformed police burst past me like the Charge of the Light Brigade. They were eager to do their duty.

Harsh? Look, I consider Moore one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. Nearly half-way through his pulp novels, I'm beginning to understand why they were disowned. French for Murder was written for money; in 1954 it's advance on royalties brought in US$2,500. Compare this to the C$227.30 advance received the following year for Judith Hearne.

We all have to eat.

Object: A slim, 144-page mass market paperback blessed with a cover painting by American realist painter Clark Hulings. Fawcett's Gold Medal paperbacks typically had print runs of 200,000 copies.

Access: Non-circulating copies may be found at Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library and eleven of our university libraries. At US$3.00, it's pretty clear that the cheapest copy currently listed for sale online has been thrown up by someone who has no idea that Bernard Mara is Brian Moore. Nearly all the others – a total of sixteen – are hip. We begin with a US$25 "Fair reading copy", then go all the way up to US$200 being asked by two booksellers offering "unread" copies. However do they know?

Related posts:

Brian Moore's True First

Murders Move in on Montreal

No Lady Before Judith Hearne
No Gun for Gloria

Words Fail Me

Recalled to Life

Grant Allen

eBooksLib

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See: Caustic Cover Critic